Sarah, buy some cans of A/D from your vet and give that.  It really helps
put on weight, and keep the weight on.
 
You know your friend and your ferrets best, Sarah, so you'll be the best
one to know what will turn her off form the material available at places
like http://www.ferretcentral.org (not .com which is much more recent, far
less informative, and possibly less useful for your need).  Why not try the
technique of pointing out that she'll need a bit of hands-on experience so
have HER scrape your little ones' litter pots and corner presents as part
of the approach.  My bet is that SHELTER TEENS AND SHELTER KIDS will have
the best set of advice for you for teaching your unrealistic friend.
 
I am officially jealous of Melissa who lives in an area where it's possible
to afford a room-of-their-own for the ferrets.  Between retirement savings,
savings for helping relatives, and the sheer cost of living in one of the
more expensive areas for housing in the East (Heck, in the country...) we
can't have that luxury.  Oh, well, we will eventually.  Congrats, M!
 
Kathy, I suspect that the reason those after-bite shots aren't used is
because the testing hasn't been done.  Okay, a bit of a ferret folk history
lesson here on what work went into finally having vaccinated ferrets have a
quarantine period after bites rather than being put down.  First, several
drug companies had to be convinced to devote the extremely high cost and
effort to see if any other their vaccines would even be okay for ferrets
(not kill them).  That took it down to something like three options.
Whether these three would be safe enough for ferrets to have regularly was
actually checked for free at Marshall Farms and those ferrets were then
adopted rather than sold.  I know this because I know the vet who used to
be there and who was involved.  I can't recall why the other two besides
IMRAB 3 were dropped from study, but I know one caused some neurological
damage.  I also know that the vet herself adopted the one with damage --
or it may have been two that had some some damage but of those only one
with bad damage -- she took any needing extra care into her own family so
that the ferret(s) would always have love and care; do know that the badly
injured ferret happened to live to ripe old age happily with her.  Anyway,
that took the playing field among the submitted vaccines down to IMRAB 3.
Then there had to be a load of tests arranged between the government and
Merial to test IMRAB 3 and make sure that it actually is effective at
stopping the acquisition of rabies -- also a very long process which cost
lives and time as well as a lot of money.  Finally, there had to be the
push to understand the shedding period of the rabies virus in ferrets which
contract it.  That was done by the CDC in conjunction with the vet school
and rabies lab in Kansas, and others.  You can find all this stuff in old
FML posts using the search feature.  Like some of the rest of the process
it meant that ferrets did die so that even more could live.  Remember that
before this quite a number of ferrets were needlessly killed to be careful
that people hadn't been exposed to rabies.  It was NOT needed to prove a
bite to have one killed and there WERE cases in which people had others'
ferrets destroyed by claiming that a bite occurred when none had.  There
was even a case in which an elderly man did NOT want the ferret destroyed
after that old man's tremor's had caused him to catch his hand on
something.  Since he'd been patting Kodo and it couldn't be proven that he
hadn't bumped himself against a tooth and not known it Kodo died after a
long and painful court battle.  I recall one situation in which a child had
a cut and the reason wasn't know but she'd put her finger through the bars
of a ferrets cage in a store with many kits; all the kits were killed.
The entire process to save the lives of so many ferrets long term took
over ten years and a great deal of effort, time, money, etc. on the parts
of several groups of ferret people.
 
Giving the shots post-injury probably would not be likely to save as many
ferrets as the testing required for approval would kill.  No one wants
ferrets to die.  It was painful to have no real choice except to have some
die to save very many more.  (Within the first few months after the changes
in the Compendium for Animal Rabies Control there were already more ferrets
saved nationally than the testing killed.)
 
Kath, you are right about everyone needing to work to improve animal care
legislation.  Some of that is national but most is state by state here in
the U.S.  I know that some European countries seem to have stronger laws
than much of the U.S.  and some more lax ones.  It takes real organization
to do that sort of thing but that is something the FML members have
certainly created in the past.  We had that here for most of the efforts
which finally ended with the changes in the Compendium.  There were enough
people who put in real effort.  I think that some of these people got
burned out.  Most redirected themselves to other efforts like sheltering
or medical improvements.  What is needed for changing legislation is for
new people who don't already have a load of ferret responsibilities to
step forward and be willing to get people in their locales together to
change things for the better.  That is usually done by being friendly and
persuasive (with facts in hand and clearly documented) rather than butting
heads and forming enemies in the wrong places.  I am sure that people who
know the routine will be happy to help give advice now and then -- here, in
other ferret groups, and in humane groups in general.  First, get together
your facts and then either your teams and your legislative people who have
a history of supporting animal care issues.  Take your lead from the
legislative people who know the ropes.
[Posted in FML issue 3094]